Carnegie recognizes IU for local involvement

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching selected IU-Bloomington and IU-Purdue University Fort Wayne for the 2010 Community Engagement Classification out of 154 applied institutions.

The National Advisory Panel consults the classification team at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. The team consists of John Saltmarsh, the director of the NERCHE, along with Amy Driscoll, consulting scholar.

They consider colleges and universities that demonstrate commitments to community volunteerism, teaching, research, service-learning, economic improvement for the state and more.

Junior and dietetics major Augusta Hasse is an advocate for community engagement at the Office of Service-Learning for Templeton Elementary School.

Her job as an ACE is to organize students through the Office of Service-Learning for needs at Templeton.

“We always need students to help teachers in class and help supervise the kids and everything,” she said. “I also do direct services in their classrooms. It’s one of the big parts of being an ACE. They want you to get to know the agency that you’re serving, and so I volunteered in a special education classroom last semester.”

Director of the Office of Service-Learning Nicole Schonemann said civic engagement should be an important part of every person’s life.

“If students are involved in the community, it can broaden someone’s horizons,” she said.

Although student volunteering and the OSL play a part in IU’s success in engaging the larger Monroe County community, faculty and staff have also done their parts to further contribute to the community’s needs.

In the 2008-09 school year, associate music professor Brenda Brenner at the Jacobs School of Music began to supervise a violin program for first graders at Fairview Elementary School in an effort to expose students to instrumental learning and track whether their reading scores improved.

Since the program succeeded in helping students academically, Brenner said 29 IU students now work for the program at Fairview and Highland Park School, and it will extend to second graders and selected third graders.

“It has changed many music students’ attitudes and perceptions about working with an underserved population and has given them valuable experience working with a population that is quite gratifying to teach,” Brenner said.

Right now, Kasia Bugaj, assistant instructor of the violin program started at Fairview, is helping Brenner head a similar program at a school in Attica, Ind.

Senior and ACE Gabrielle Cheikh has been involved with the global chapter of the Community Foundation.

Every year the Community Foundation takes a trip to Guatemala, among other places, to give medical service.

“IU goes once a year for spring break,” she said. “We’ve been to Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and now we’re with Guatemala. Each trip pairs with a local organization in that country, and we work with them to set up medical clinics in five to seven small villages.”

Cheikh also said she is interested in what other Bloomington nonprofits do for the
community.

“I think Bloomington in general has a lot of great organizations that are supported by the community,” she said. “They’re also just internally run in a way that’s more about empowerment than giving. So I think that Bloomington really got it right when they started these nonprofits. I think the community really knows how to help people in a direct way.”